Regarding the Pain of Others

Summary

A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects

Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock?

In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

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Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag

—TENNYSON

1

In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, How in your opinion are we to prevent war? Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, the educated class, a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated—read: privileged, well-off—woman like her know of war? Can her recoil from its allure be like his?

Let us test this difficulty of communication, Woolf proposes, by looking together at images of war. The images are some of the photographs the beleaguered Spanish government has been sending out twice a week; she footnotes: Written in the winter of 1936–37. Let’s see, Woolf writes, whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things. She continues:

This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room …

The quickest, driest way to convey the inner commotion caused by these photographs is by noting that one can’t always make out the subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone they depict. And from there Woolf speeds to her conclusion. We do have the same responses, however different the education, the traditions behind us, she says to the lawyer. Her evidence: both we—here women are the we—and you might well respond in the same words.

You, Sir, call them horror and disgust. We also call them horror and disgust … War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be held), and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives to armed conflict. It may be hard to credit the desperate resolve produced by the aftershock of the First World War, when the realization of the ruin Europe had brought on itself took hold. Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange of letters in 1932 titled Why War? Woolf’s Three Guineas, appearing toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war, offered the originality (which made this the least well received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man’s game—that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf’s version of Why War? does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.

Invoking this hypothetical shared experience (we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses), Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Does it? To be sure, Woolf and the unnamed addressee of this book-length letter are not any two people. Although they are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes, as Woolf has reminded him, the lawyer is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. His antiwar opinions are no more in doubt than are hers. After all, his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

It is this we that Woolf challenges at the start of her book: she refuses to allow her interlocutor to take a we for granted. But into this we, after the pages devoted to the feminist point, she then subsides.

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

* * *

WHO ARE THE WE at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That we would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but—a far larger constituency—those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making real (or more real) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.

Here then on the table before us are photographs, Woolf writes of the thought experiment she is proposing to the reader as well as to the spectral lawyer, who is eminent enough, as she mentions, to have K.C., King’s Counsel, after his name—and may or may not be a real person. Imagine then a spread of loose photographs extracted from an envelope that arrived in the morning post. They show the mangled bodies of adults and children. They show how war evacuates, shatters, breaks apart, levels the built world. A bomb has torn open the side, Woolf writes of the house in one of the pictures. To be sure, a cityscape is not made of flesh. Still, sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street. (Kabul, Sarajevo, East Mostar, Grozny, sixteen acres of lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001, the refugee camp in Jenin …) Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage—these, for Woolf, would be the reactions of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.

But is it true that these photographs, documenting the slaughter of noncombatants rather than the clash of armies, could only stimulate the repudiation of war? Surely they could also foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic. Isn’t this what they were meant to do? The agreement between Woolf and the lawyer seems entirely presumptive, with the grisly photographs confirming an opinion already held in common. Had the question been, How can we best contribute to the defense of the Spanish Republic against the forces of militarist and clerical fascism?, the photographs might instead have reinforced their belief in the justness of that

Reviews

Not for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is the twin desire/disgust that accompanies the spectator who finds themselves "regarding" (seeing, witnessing, enduring) the pain of others. I have spent very little time combing the internet looking at photographs of atrocities and suffering in my life. Since Sontag offers us no visuals in this short book, I found myself again and again having to search for the images she describes. Thus I have spent a very long day confronting the evil we do, regarding the pain of others, and regarding that regard. And now I am very sad, but also very unsurprised.

An analysis of the human response to images of the suffering of others. Mainly relating to pictures of people afflicted by war from Goya's 18th century Disasters of War, to late 20th century conflicts depicted in photographs and film. The book discusses the impact these images have on the viewer and any utility they may have in making a less violent world. The bits I enjoyed most were the things I hadn't considered before. For example, many of the older war photographs were staged or at least had various props (cannon balls etc) moved around for effect. Only with Vietnam and televised war did photographers up their game and probity. Throughout the book she drops in bits and pieces that you feel you should know more about e.g. the RAF bombing Iraq in the 1920s, extermination of the Herero in Namibia, the rape of Nanking. All in all an interesting read and worthy of a re-read.

Much in the way AIDS and its metaphors is an update of Illness as metaphor, likewise Regarding the pain of others (2004) is an update of On Photography (1977). Unfortunately, the follow-up books are not as original and well-written as the first-conceived editions. Perhaps avoiding a repetition of earlier ideas or arguments, the follow-up books, they are not as sparkling, a mere shadow of the original works.The title of Regarding the pain of others is ambiguous, based on the possible double meaning of the word "regarding". The essay is therefore as much, but not solely about "pain", but much more about "viewing suffering," i.e. the pain of others.The essay deals with various types of images, starting with Sixteenth century etchings by Goltzius, and moves on to discuss the graphic work of Hans Ulrich Frank of soldiers killing peasants, dated to 1652 or the end of the Thirty Years' War, and Francisco Goya's early Nineteenth century work, a series of 83 etchings under the title Los Desastres de la Guerra. However, Sontag's essay does not convincingly bear out that these etchings are works of art, and cannot be regarded as the equivalent of journalistic photography. The essay is largely concerned with journalistic and war photography and filmography.Regarding the pain of others does touch upon the satisfaction derived from watching the suffering of others, or at least images thereof. But the work is far more focused on describing the medium of photography than exploring man's fascination with the images of suffering. This is regrettable, as the ambiguous title gave an outlook on a broad spectrum of interest, which in this essay is only interpreted in the narrow sense of photography.

There were times when Ms. Sontag made excellent points and had me thinking about things from a new point of view, and times when she seemed to write in circles and never really made a point. I liked the book, and I think it says things we need to hear, but even this short book had a lot of extra fluff that seemed to hide the ideas and thoughts that were most important.

Academic discussion about the history of documenting war, conflict and death through art/paintings/drawings and then, in more modern times, photography. Contains interesting facts about the evolution of using the camera on battlefields and during the aftermath of massacres, bombings, etc, as well as the ethics involved with of broadcasting and/or censoring the images captured.

This was a really quick, rather interesting read. Sontag's essential argument is that the saturation of images of violence through the modern media has begun to inure us to the pain of other human beings. She traces the history of war photography, network decisions about which footage to air, etc. and makes a rather compelling and humane argument. I think it's just about the perfect length, I believe I read it in a couple of evenings and then passed it on to my mom.

This is a powerful and profound book that forces us to rethink our relationship to the steady stream of horrific images of human suffering from locales both nearby and exotic that have increasingly saturated our lives as the mass media have developed over the past two centuries. Sontag rejects simple notions about what it means to, through the media, be specatators to the horrible suffering of others. (E.g., that images of suffering make us callous and indifferent to suffering or move us to a genuine sympathy with others.) Rather, she calls for what might be calld an ethics of spectatorship that requires us to 1) move beyond mere sympathy to analyze our relationship to the suffering we see, and to stop it if we can; and 2) to acknowledge the irreducible, incomparable quality of the suffering of others -- the uniqueness of suffering must be acknowledged, as well as the impossiblity of those who do not suffer to fully understand.